


dry your eyes, there's no cause to weep; the weather is fine and the road isn't steep

by Dialux



Series: dry your eyes and give me your hand [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-20 16:38:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14265216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: “Welcome home,” she says, and bows, deep as she’d once bowed to Jon’s queen, just a fraction deeper than she’d once bowed to Jon himself.Sansa is many things, but she knows the subtleties of the game first and best. Better he think her icy than the terrible storm frothing under her skin right now, made of jagged teeth she cannot help but feel along the insides of her veins.She will not let herself be vulnerable again.Not even if she must cut out her heart.[Jon returns to Winterfell after the Long Night. There is anger and bitterness and loss between them, but slowly- he and Sansa bridge it.]





	dry your eyes, there's no cause to weep; the weather is fine and the road isn't steep

**Author's Note:**

> alternate POV to "the world is still round, my compass is true; each step is a step back to you".

****The raven arrives on the sixth-moon anniversary of the Night King’s fall.

Sansa reads it, of course. She is the Warden of the North, and not a fool either. When the Queen writes a letter by her own hand, one cannot just ignore it. No matter how much it stings to read the dark-inked words. No matter the twist and crash of her heart.

She is not a child any longer, however, and so Sansa reads it in private, because she cannot be certain what her face will show the maester.

She is not a child any longer, but Sansa is a sister and an almost-queen, and the cousin to one of the most idiotic men in all of Westeros. If the rest of them are allowed to act like fools, then she is as well.

The parchment burns a brilliant white when she tosses it into the fire.

...

_He’s left. Ensure he does not die, Lady Stark, and keep him content if you can._

...

(Sansa cares little about Daenerys Targaryen, but she can quite do without advice from a woman who’s not known the least bit of family for the majority of her life; she can do less without advice on her cousin, who’s already twice as stubborn and thrice as moronic as any other member of Sansa’s family, which is not without its stubborn and moronic individuals.

Daenerys will never know it, but the words which incense Sansa the most of her raven are  _if you can.)_

...

When Jon rides through the gates, it feels like she’s been there before, sitting in the same place, all in reverse. There’s still snow caught on his furs, and a grim exhaustion weighting his shoulders otherwise, and he’s pale as a ghost.

But under the pallor, under the dust, under the ice- he’s  _alive._

“Welcome home,” she says, and bows, deep as she’d once bowed to Jon’s queen, just a fraction deeper than she’d once bowed to Jon himself.

Sansa is many things, but she knows the subtleties of the game first and best. Better he think her icy than the terrible storm frothing under her skin right now, made of jagged teeth she cannot help but feel along the insides of her veins.

She will not let herself be vulnerable again.

Not even if she must cut out her heart.

Jon- in the space of a few moments, he seems to take over the hall. Sansa wonders at the skill even as she resents it; what’s taken her hours of painstaking effort to get put together- wildlings and Northerners all in the same room, none of them wearing weapons- seems to pale in front of Jon’s smiles and wry jokes. Their wariness fades and is replaced by wine, and then with laughter. Before it turns to snores, Sansa leaves.

He’s been gone for near a year, and in that time she’s ruled well. But Sansa is still heartsick, a thousand fears and even more griefs piled over her until she feels like a child playing at rocks on the riverbanks.

She enters her solar. For a long, aching moment, she stares at the door to her room- not a soul would think less of her for resting, instead of working until the small hours of the morning. For a long moment, Sansa considers it, and then she heads to her desk instead.

...

Robb had taught her that game, she remembers, right after Bran was born.

Sansa had been so worried for her mother- the nursery was next to her mother’s chambers, and no one had thought to remove the children before the screaming started. Looking back, she’s certain Robb must have been just as afraid as she, but he hadn’t said anything of the sort, instead taking her to the pools and dragging her down to sit next to him in the soft, squishy mud.

 _How many rocks can you balance on the back of your hand?_ He’d asked, and Sansa had piled almost seven on them, all the prettiest, shiniest ones she could find.  _Now,_ Robb had said, eyes shining just as bright as the stones, as the sky above them,  _how many can you catch if you flip your hand fast enough?_

None, Sansa’d found, though Robb could catch three with ease, four if he was lucky.

She’s forgotten that game. There had been evenings when she’d gone to the godswood, balancing stones on her hands and flipping them as quickly as she could. 

Her heart feels as heavy as her hands did then.

...

From the start, Sansa avoids him.

Avoids him as much as she can without feeling like a coward, which isn’t much: Jon seems to be intent on grubbying his hands with every inch of Winterfell that she’s made hers while he’s been gone, unheeding of all that she’s lost along the way, uncaring of the things that the stone and earth have seen over the months of the Long Night.

“I thought we should talk,” he says, eyes the silver of a drawn blade, skin the pale of snow unsullied.

Sansa’s seen blood spilled across that snow. Sansa’s spilled that blood herself.

 _Not now,_ she thinks, nails biting into the flesh of her palm.  _I cannot do this now._

“Tonight, then,” she says, and her voice does not waver at all.

...

Hunger tends to hollow people out- Sansa’s seen it, the shadows that make people’s eyes too large, the pain that never truly fades from their too-thin skin. But hunger has never had that effect on her. 

(As a child, she’d starved for power. In King’s Landing, Sansa starved for love. In the Eyrie, Sansa starved for truth. In Winterfell- she starved, for food as well as life. For her entire life, she’s been a hungering beast, so desperate she can all but taste the blood on her teeth.)

Hunger hollows others, but Sansa’s spent too long being hollowed out. No: hunger sharpens her, until her bones stand out like knives and her every motion is more cutting than a Dothraki’s weapon. Hunger makes Sansa dangerous, and she does not know how to make it  _stop._

...

This is not a lie.

...

Here is a lie:

If she knew how to stop it, Sansa would not hesitate.

...

That night, she lingers in the hall for as long as possible. Jon looks impatient but she ignores him until she sees others taking note- then, and only then, does she lead him to her solar.

“You wished to speak to me,” Sansa tells him.

She is surrounded by darkness, by cold. She rather likes it this way. If she closes her eyes, the wind feels like breath. If she lets herself rest just slightly, she can imagine that the breath is Arya’s, or Bran’s, or Rickon’s. 

Sansa does not let herself rest often. But the choice is there, always, and it is that which gives her courage.

“Yes,” says Jon. Sansa imagines how he’ll continue:  _I did what I had to do. It was necessary. I’m so tired, Sansa-_

“I thought I should- I don’t know- apologize?”

 _For what?_ Sansa wants to ask. But she knows, well, what he’s referring to: things that Sansa’d asked of him, things that Jon could not deliver, things that Sansa cannot forgive.  _I asked you to come home. You could give me a castle, and you could not give the rest of your family one day?_

And for all of this, there is surprise underneath, like river water flowing under solid ice. Surprise for his gall in bringing it up. 

She’d thought they’d continue their delicate dance around the subject, but Jon looks as if he’d rather spit himself on his own sword than do that.

“The people you owe your apologies to-” she takes a single, shallow breath, one that Jon hopefully cannot see in the darkness. Sansa feels Arya’s breath on the back of her neck, can smell Bran as the weirwood tree rustles in the godswood. It  _hurts._ “-are dead. You certainly don’t owe any such to me.” 

“Sansa-”

“Is that all?” She wants to leave. She wants to leave so badly that her teeth start to ache.

 _“No,”_ says Jon, sharply. “It’s not. There’s a lot that’s happened in Winterfell while I was gone, and I think we should  _talk_  about some of it-” 

Anger unfurls down Sansa’s throat like sunlight over a mountain. “There’s a lot that happened in Westeros while you were gone.” Unable to hold herself back, she continues: “Winterfell must seem very small after seeing all that. Anyhow, I think you know all the salient details.”

“You killed Littlefinger.”

“Yes,” says Sansa, cold as she can manage. 

“Bran,” says Jon, and Sansa can’t help her reflexive flinch. It has been months since she’s heard those names, for all that they’re constant presences by her side. “Arya.”

“What of them?” she asks. 

“They died.” Jon doesn’t say the next words out loud, but Sansa hears them nonetheless:  _you let them die._

It bites like she’s in the cold in only her nightdress. Sansa wants to cry, but her eyes are drier than bone. She speaks through the lump in her throat, and it sounds too uneven to her ears; uneven and bitter and more furious than she’d expected.

“They came home, and they asked after you.” One breath. Just one. One breath, cold in her lungs. Then she bites back the anger. “I’m not sure what else there is to be spoken of them.”

Jon looks so angry then- Sansa’d expected the anger, but not the depth of it. Not the way his face twists. Not the way his eyes look dark as a storm’s shadow. And for all of this, there’s no fear in Sansa; she’s doubted a lot of Jon over the months- years- but never that he’d hurt her. That leaves her more gnarled on the inside, that trust, than anything else.

“They’re your sister,” he whispers. “Your sister, your brother, the last of your family- don’t you care? At least a little?”

“They were,” she says. “They were the last of my family. And now I am the last, the last of the Starks, and I find speaking of the dead a fruitless task for if I began it I’d never be able to stop.”  _I loved them. They might have doubted that- but never that I’d be there for my blood. You? I cannot say the same of you._ “So no, to answer you: if you name my words a measure of my love, then I am afraid I no longer love anything but the North.”

She surges to her feet and moves to the door. She’s already almost opened the door before she pauses: just because she’s angry doesn’t mean she has to be selfish. Sansa’s never been cruel in her life; she won’t start now.

“If you find being in my presence an insurmountable task,” she says quietly, “I would not stop you from leaving.”

...

That night she sits at her vanity and stares into the old bronze mirror. There’s a tint to it that wasn’t there with her mother’s silver, but that mirror’s lost to the Bolton burning. So Sansa makes do with this old, wavy thing; it makes her neck look a little too long, her features a little grotesque, and it still manages to feel like a reassurance.

A reflection means that she is still alive. At least to a mirror- she exists.

Her hair is brushed, her nightdress soft against her spine. The maids have turned down the covers for her bed. There is but one lamp, and if she doesn’t pinch it out soon, it will burn out.

Sansa closes her eyes and doesn’t move. She breathes: in, out, slow and steady. 

The ache in her chest doesn’t disappear.

The wind feels like Arya. The wind feels like Bran. The wind feels like Robb, and her father, her mother, Rickon. For just a moment it turns biting, cruel against her cheeks, and it feels like Petyr. Petyr, or Cersei, or-

A thousand betrayals Sansa has felt, and she has bled for none so red as Jon’s.

She will not cry. Her only kin thinks her bloodless and without love.  _Very well then,_ Sansa decides, fingers soft against the bristles of her hairbrush.  _I am loveless then, and old beyond my years. I will not tie down a man who loathes my very presence._

Jon thinks she’s failed. 

Sansa hadn’t known there was a game to fail at. 

She’d thought she’d killed it along with Petyr. She refuses to play another one now, with Jon and herself and Daenerys as a trifecta of pieces on a chessboard- Sansa’s seen the price of these games, and if Jon tries to bring such thoughts into her home, into Winterfell’s stones, she will not tolerate it.

There is so little  _good_ in her life. She knows how fragile a castle’s bones and muscles are, and she knows how beautiful the sunrise looks when it paints the Eastern Gate, how warm the kitchens are, how kind and nourishing a proper ruler can be to the land.  Sansa won’t taint what she has.

She doesn’t cry that night, but neither does she sleep.

...

When she offers to let him leave, Jon runs away. 

Then he comes back, that night, gloomy as ever.

Sansa doesn’t know what to make of it.

...

It’s scarcely a week later that the fragile peace fractures. 

Sansa’d expected- she’s not sure what she’d expected, entirely, but she hadn’t thought it would happen so dramatically, nor so suddenly.

It starts with her noticing him at the far end of the council room. The room had, once, been a distillery; the smell of ale and wine still sits there, like an old friend. The furrow to Jon’s brow looks an awful lot like judgment, and it’s that which makes Sansa smooth out her face- the choice is either that or bristling, and Lord Manderly- whom she’s supposed to be listening to right now- won’t take kindly to any posturing.

The man’s been droning about the same problem for nearly an hour. 

And-  _yes-_ Sansa regrets sending that invitation to Sothoryos, if for nothing else than that it’s cost her a very good ally in Wyman Manderly. But she remembers how Jaime and Brienne had looked at the end.

Haunted was one word. Hunted was another. They’d held onto each other with a desperation that rivaled only their exhaustion. And they’d come to Sansa for help, because they hadn’t trusted anyone else. She couldn’t repay that with betrayal, as Daenerys Targaryen seemed to expect.

_If I regret anything, it’s that I couldn’t find another way off of this continent._

Smuggling them away hadn’t been easy. Westeros and Essos both answered to Daenerys, and she wasn’t inclined to let her father’s killer just disappear. Sothoryos had been the only option.

“I understand your worries, Lord Manderly,” she says, now, as soothingly as possible. “But there’s nothing more I can do right now. The ships aren’t under my control.”

“They’re taking up too much of my harbor. Lowering prices- gods know what kind of fish they grow in Sothoryos-” the  _same_ point he’d made at four different council meetings in the past week- “to sell them at a quarter what we sell at home! They’re undercutting all my markets, and it wouldn’a have started if it weren’t for your single boat-”

_Enough._

“I did not know that Sothoryan sailors consider an invitation to one an invitation to all,” Sansa says through the headache starting behind one eye. 

“And yet they’re in my harbor as we speak,” Manderly says, voice only going louder the calmer she remains. “If it weren’t for your one-handed fool and lady knight-”

He continues, but Sansa feels herself stiffen at the reminder. People  _know_ things right now, each having a different piece of a very dangerous puzzle. If anyone were to find out the truth- that Sansa sent the Kingslayer away, that she changed trade policies to smuggle him out- Sansa’s not sure if she’ll have a head for much longer.

“Sansa,” she hears.

 _Of course._ The one person who seems to hate her the most these days, who also has all of the knowledge needed to connect the bits of information that Manderly’s doling out.  _I do not want to do this._

Slowly, she looks up at Jon. There’s stark, naked realization in his eyes, along with a sort of horrified fascination. “Yes?”

“No,” whispers Jon. “Tell me you did not- tell me you did  _not-_  you weren’t foolish enough to-”

_I will show you foolishness, Jon Snow._

_I will show you courage._

“Is there something you wish to say?” 

“You did not knowingly commit treason,” he says, and it is the way he says those words, the lilt to  _treason,_ the bite to  _knowingly,_ that makes Sansa rise to her feet. 

She doesn’t remember what she says, nor how she moves, but when she enters her solar her hands are trembling very, very finely. Jon follows her in and Sansa fights the urge to slam the door behind him, loud and thunderous. She wants to see him flinch at least a little.

He sputters some words-  _I will not-_ and Sansa could not hold back the rage even if she tried.

It is as the tide, as stopping the tide with one’s bare hands. Impossible. And yet: fools try.

“What will you not do?” she asks loudly. “You will not look away from the one kindness I was able to give the best woman I’ve ever known? You will not accept that I did something your queen would have disapproved of? You will not-”

“-she is your queen as well-”

_I never knelt to her. Not as you did._

“-not so much as yours,” Sansa says.

The silence that passes afterwards- she almost regrets the hurt in Jon’s eyes.  _I’ve never been cruel,_ she thinks, but Jon brings out the worst in her as nobody else has ever managed.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks.

 _I will not start being cruel now,_ she decides, again, as she’s done every morning since Sansa learned what cruelty was.  _I will not become that, no matter how it hurts._

“What is there left to say?” she asks, very evenly. “I don’t want your words, Jon. You made your choices. And I don’t pretend to know- to understand- why you’re here.” It is exasperation that colors her next words. Not grief. Not anger. “You cannot look me in the eye, you walk around Winterfell as if someone were holding a sword to your throat, you snap at all those who cross your path- you’re unhappy to be here, but when I tell you to leave you refuse.”

One breath, then two, and then she sits behind the desk. Her legs are shaking too much not to, and she needs the breeze at her back, along the nape of her neck, to ground her. The cold, moving silence of Arya and Bran and all of her demons, all of her ghosts, crowded behind her.

As kindly as she knows to be, Sansa says, “Go home. To your dragon queen in the south. To where you are  _happy.”_

Still, Jon hesitates. “And you?” he asks. “Would you be happy then?” Sansa pauses, mouth parting in astonishment, and his hands fist together at his sides. “Would you be happy if I left?”

 _I would be happy if you were happy,_ Sansa thinks, and she is so tired of it- suddenly, furiously,  _tired._ She doesn’t want this bitterness hashed out over hours and hours of discussion. She wants to rule Winterfell for as many years as she has, with all the good that she has inside of her, and then die with the dignity that has not been offered to the rest of her family. Sansa is good at the game of words; but she is tired, and she will not play games within the walls of her home. Not any longer.

So she says the truth.

“I would rather one of us be happy than none.”

A breeze buoys her, rustling her hair, and she feels so wild, so free, in that moment- light as the rainbows that she used to dance in, thrown from ice in the godswood. She looks at Jon and it is love that alights in her, as the earth remains under layers of snow, alive even through the worst winters: the bitterness and rage sloughed off, melted under the heat of her anger. It is love the makes her look him in the eye, at the first man she’s loved since her father’s death.

Jon’s face- he looks paler, and smaller, as if the defining edges of him have been scrubbed out of existence. He steps forwards, each step measured, hands clenching and unclenching, until he’s close enough for her to feel the warmth of his body, his boots almost brushing her skirts.

“I cannot,” he says, and this man who won Winterfell back for her looks halfway defeated. “I will not. But more importantly, I cannot.”

“Why?” Sansa asks, because defeat sits uneasily on Jon’s brow. “Whyever-”

“Winterfell is my home,” he says. “Whatever else- this is my home.”

“Yes,” Sansa murmurs. “But, Jon-”

And, suddenly, it is as if she has unleashed Jon’s own flood of words- they erupt from him in a torrent, and she can tell how useless it would be to try to stop him.  _We are both fools,_ she thinks, and feels a strange sort of affection well up within her breastbone.

“I could not be a Targaryen for Daenerys,” says Jon. “That’s what she wanted from me. That’s why I- that’s why I left. That’s why I’ll never go back.” Jon seizes her hand, drops to his knees, swallows painfully. “That’s why I would- come back. To swear to you. To stand by your side. To protect you.” He breathes in, and Sansa takes the moment to study his face: to see the scar running down his eye, the lines bracketing his mouth. “If you would wish to send me away- if you want that- if that would make you more content- I would not pause for a moment.”

Everyone says Jon looks like their father.

In that moment, in the brilliant light, Sansa thinks he looks like Lyanna Stark: young and terrible and beautiful and fragile. Arya had never looked like this in front of Sansa. Her father had never done so, not even when he was being executed. But she thinks- perhaps her father had seen- on Lyanna’s deathbed, she would have looked like this.

“No more vows,” Sansa whispers, because Bran’s told them how her father swore to keep Jon a secret, because there is a long, ugly history behind them of broken vows, of broken hearts, of broken bodies. “Please.”

“Sansa.” Jon pauses, looking at her with the steadiness of a raven’s flight.

“No more,” she orders. “Arya swore to keep us safe, and she died in those snows. Bran swore to an all-seeing duty, and he died fighting the Night’s King. I am tired, of swearing vows and breaking vows and swearing them anew. Better to do what you can. Better to spend your life trying, and die knowing that; rather than trying, and lamenting all you could not do. No more  _vows,_  Jon.”

He drops his face to her hands and she feels the shudders through his skull- his entire body is shaking- and Sansa does not remember making any decisions to move, but her legs shift so he’s a warm weight against them, and her hand- the one that isn’t holding his- curls through his hair until she feels lassitude sink into her bones, heavy and thick as honey. They don’t move after that, not until the sun’s gone down and they must attend to supper.

Even then- it’s awkward, a little, getting up with such stiffness in their muscles, but Sansa can also feel little spurts of glee, bright as the first sunflowers of spring, erupting inside of her every time she brushes Jon- his elbow, his stomach, his neck- even by accident.

There is no room for self-consciousness in her now.

...

They sleep together. Sansa does not fear him, not even in the early mornings when her nightmares seem most realistic- there’s Jon’s scent, Jon’s warmth, and she has never once doubted that his strength will protect her. 

She never thought she’d have this in her life.

But he is  _there,_ so alive, so vivid, and Sansa cannot stop the smiles from curving her lips or the warmth from wrapping around her heart. 

 _Is this love?_ she asks Arya, one morning, from an open window in her chambers.  _Is this love, Arya? This lightness in my belly, this heat in my chest; when we are in the same room my eyes reach his first and when we aren’t I’m always looking for him._

There is no answer.

But the air is thick with the sharp scent of weirwoods, and Sansa knows the truth as she knows her name and she knows her life.

_Yes._

...

 _I love you,_ Sansa knows, but she never believes that Jon could feel the same way. Or, perhaps he would, but not in the way that she feels; not all-consuming, not entire. 

And then- one night- it is not so different from all the rest; Jon is in her bed, and Sansa’s had wine to make her tongue looser, and the world feels both hazy and golden.

“Stay because you want to,” she whispers against his skin. 

And Jon- beautiful, shining Jon- he props himself on his elbow, runs a hand from her scalp to the ends of her hair until she feels lazy and content and half-asleep.

“When I left the Red Keep,” he whispers, “when I rode North. I didn’t think about Winterfell, Sansa. When I thought of where to go, I didn’t think about Winterfell at all.” The briefest pause, a moment which a braver woman would have used to kiss him. “I came home,” he says.

“Yes,” Sansa replies. “To Winterfell.”

“To you,” he answers, ignorant of everything that he is setting ablaze to inside of Sansa- all the kindling that is now becoming a flame, hot and large as Winterfell’s highest tower, a beacon that she cannot imagine can ever be doused. “To you, Sansa.”

She kisses him, then, and after that she laughs, because the joy that bubbles through her veins cannot be contained by silence.

...

Years later- decades later- Sansa takes their children to the riverbank and teaches them to balance stones on their hands. They are there, all of them: red-haired and dark, fair-eyed and blue; with rangy bones and Tully skin and a thousand different ghosts that she refuses to look at inside of them.

“My brother taught me,” she says, and flips her hands; grins mischievously at her eldest, who’s piled almost eight different stones on his small hand. 

They don’t understand. If they never understand, Sansa will be content. No children of hers will ever know the weight of a stone dragging against their heart.

When Jon comes over to her, Sansa smiles at him. He is haloed by the sunset, and the river is cold against her toes, and their children are loud behind them.   _Love,_ Sansa thinks, and does not wait for any of her ghosts to answer before she reaches up to kiss him. 

It is the kindest thing she has ever done to herself.


End file.
